FLOSS in Latin America and the Caribbean

This editorial characterises Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as a social movement in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, and traces its growth.

Author Lena Zúñiga offers this piece as part of Bellanet LAC's investigation, which is supported by PAN-Americas and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), into how FLOSS is being used and produced in the LAC region. In addition to obtaining an overview of the FLOSS movement, organisers sought to engage in a participative investigation in partnership with the free software community, to the end of understanding what brings diverse groups and organisations together to make up this community and to helping them generate the questions that would be most useful, relevant, and appropriate for them.

A key purpose of this study, and a thread running throughout this editorial, is a focus on "FLOSS as a theme that by its very characteristics allow it to generate a social movement around it, rather than towards the study of FLOSS as a technological phenomenon." In the words of Ms. Zúñiga, these characteristics "are linked with the growing (although still very limited) access to information and communication technologies, the acquisition of technological user skills by some of the key sectors (for example, social organisations and universities) as well as the recognised need to take control of the language to allow for the transformation of the technologies, for the technologies to begin responding to their own needs."

She identifies several themes that emerge in the development of this field, and this movement, including the tendencies of the movement in the region. They include:

• The collective production of commons - individuals and organisations group together and participate in order to use and produce software, processes that involve the development of a series of rules for participation, community identity, content dissemination, and the like.
• The gender roles in these collaborative processes - degrees and types of participation by men and women in the movement are shaped by the prevailing gender roles in the region (e.g., small numbers of women shape coding and documentation processes; they participate to a greater extent in user communities as well as groups that distribute FLOSS, educate about it, and reflect on the social impact and incidence of related public policies).
• The development and articulation of common positions, or "stands", regarding controversial social and political topics related to FLOSS such as the regulation of intellectual property and governmental policies related to democratising access to new technologies. Furthermore, some members of this movement in the LAC region "are working to move forward and to better understand the use of open contents in areas such as education, the arts and science."

The author concludes with the following suggestion that discussion about LAC's FLOSS movement and its growth will continue: "One of the objectives of the second year of investigation is the creation of common agendas so that key stakeholders from diverse sectors can jointly put forward their ideas, capacities and projections regarding the future of the FLOSS movement in the region."

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